Waikiki Beach gets a needed replenishment

For Waikiki surfers and beachgoers who have felt constrained by sand being dredged from a barge offshore, piped onshore and heaped in a big gray pyramid covering much of Kuhio Beach, the end is in sight.

Early Monday morning, workers began scooping truckloads of sand from the pile and hauling it along the shoreline to widen the beach fronting the Moana Surfrider and Royal Hawaiian resorts.

The state announced the hill will be leveled and the beach back to normal by mid-May.

Comprising approximately 20,000 cubic yards of marine sand dredged and pumped from the ocean floor about 1,000 feet offshore, between the Queens and Canoes surf breaks, the sand hill measures an estimated 30 feet high and 100 by 200 feet at its base, according to the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.

The current project, which began Jan. 26, is billed as a follow-up to a 2012 Waikiki Beach Nourishment Project that took 24,000 cubic yards of sand from the same offshore field and added it to the beach stretching between the Kuhio and Royal Hawaiian groins.

With an eye to completion before Memorial Day, the work schedule has been accelerated to take place for 12 hours a day, six days a week — from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays — and should be finished by mid-May, DLNR announced.

“We encountered a few delays, but after three months, we are happy to announce that the pumping phase has been nearly completed and we are ready to move the sand on to the beach,” Sam Lemmo, administrator of DLNR’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands, said in the announcement.

However, the offshore barge holding the hydraulic dredge and pump, and the underwater pipeline carrying the sand into the Kuhio Beach swim basin, will remain in place until that phase of the work is finished, perhaps by Saturday, DLNR said Monday in an email.

“Instead of hauling sand seven half-days each week, as originally planned, this new schedule should cut the total days on-site by at least two weeks,” said Dolan Eversole, spokesman for the Waikiki Beach Special Improvement District Association, which is funding $1 million of the $4 million project, with the rest being paid by the state. The project contractors are Kiewit Infrastructure Group and American Marine.

The sand placement will start at the Diamond Head end of the Royal Hawaiian beach cell near the Duke Kahanamoku statue and progress 100-200 linear feet down the beach toward the Royal Hawaiian groin each day, DLNR said.

The active construction zone where the sand is being placed will be cordoned off each day and clearly marked with cones, tape and barricades for people’s safety, DLNR said. The beach will remain open, but sections of beach along the truck haul route will be closed when work is underway in them, leaving dedicated openings to allow access to the ocean.

Beachgoers should be alert: Backup beepers on the trucks will be disabled and replaced with a soft “scratch” noise.

The reason for the nourishment is that “over time, beaches tend to erode due to natural processes, but on top of that we have sea level rise accelerating beach erosion,” Lemmo said, predicting that Waikiki sand replenishment will be necessary every five to 10 years over the course of the next few decades.